A Common Struggle

‘The Undivided Past,’ by David Cannadine

In “The Undivided Past,” David Cannadine challenges those who believe that all history is the history of conflict, whether over class, as Marx and Engels proclaimed, or over religion, nationality, race, gender or civilization. The fact is, mankind’s divisions may not be the most important part of the story. As Cannadine succinctly puts it, “humanity is still here.”

This is so hopeful a book, and so authoritative in its coverage of history, that a reader wants to believe its thesis. I do, but only in part.

Of all the texts that map the world into hopelessly hostile camps, “The Communist Manifesto” no doubt sold the most copies. Its authors argued that two features of class conflict would make it especially significant: class would trump all other forms of division, and the ­differences between classes would prove so profound that their strife could be resolved only through revolution. Neither of these arguments has held up in the years since the “Manifesto” was published, allowing Cannadine, who teaches history at Prince­ton, to dispense with this form of conflict handily. We now know, he reminds us, that socialists around the world rose to the defense of their countries in the run-up to World War I, thereby demonstrating that claims of nationhood can easily overwhelm those of class. In the years after World War II, by contrast, when it seemed as if the world was bitterly divided between capitalist and Communist ways of life, conflicts within the Communist bloc never disappeared and the cold war itself had more to do with classic geopolitical considerations than with anything resembling class struggle.

Communism may no longer be with us, at least as a doctrine of global revolution, but wars between nations very much are. In trying to show that theories proclaiming their inevitability are also wrong, Cannadine gives himself a more difficult challenge. But he asks: How can antagonism between nations be a feature of Western history when nations themselves are a product of recent times? Up until the 18th century, wars between states were really wars between monarchs. Even by World War I, when nationalist appeals trumped those of class, less than 5 percent of people living in what we now call Italy spoke Italian in everyday situations, while both “Germany” and “Austria-Hungary” resembled multinational empires more than unified nation-states. To be sure, the 19th and 20th centuries saw the emergence of nations with some kind of collective identity, but almost as soon as they appeared, globalization began to fracture identities once again.

Because so many religions make claims to exclusive truth, not all of them can be correct, leading the Manichaeans among us to conclude that those who are on one side cannot be on the other. Yet, Cannadine argues, religions have borrowed extensively from one another throughout history. Once the Ottomans took Constantinople, Orthodox churches found new life. Trade brought people from different faiths together. Jews and Christians found places for themselves in Baghdad while Muslims were tolerated in Sicily. The story of the Crusades is told so often that we tend to forget those individuals, like the 16th-century traveler Leo Africanus, who, in Cannadine’s words, “moved across the supposedly impermeable boundaries of religious identity with remarkable ease and frequency.” No doubt the world has its share of religious conflict — just consider Northern Ireland in the recent past and the Middle East today — but religious identity, like that of class and nation, is not fixed and implacable.

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Illustration by Lincoln Agnew

So it goes for race and gender. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose ideas influenced the Nazis, insisted that racial differences could never be overcome and so, in his own way, did the left-wing radical W. E. B. Du Bois. Similarly, it is not just male chauvinists who insist on the biological superiority of one sex over another but also “essentialist” feminists like Germaine Greer. All these arguments represent examples of “totalizing,” which Cannadine defines as “describing and defining individuals by their membership in one single group, deemed to be more important and more all-encompassing than any other solidarity.” Not only is totalizing empirically wrong, he insists, but it is also politically obnoxious in its claim that human solidarity is illusory.

Cannadine does not say so, but he may well have written his book in response to Samuel Huntington’s famous argument about the clash of civilizations. Hence his sixth and last category on collective identity. Huntington’s thesis did not originate with him, Cannadine is quick to point out, but can be traced back to Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” which featured clashes between pagan and Christian as well as Roman and barbarian civilizations. Those who followed in Gibbon’s wake — Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee are the best known — viewed history as a process of rising and falling, but remained vague on which civilizations were winning and which deserved to lose.

What’s more, the very term “civilization” was anything but merely descriptive; to German thinkers it was a step down from Kultur, while for British imperialists it was a step up from tribalism. When we get to Huntington, therefore, it comes as no surprise to learn that for Cannadine the civilizations presumed to be clashing “seem on closer inspection to be little more than arbitrary groupings and idiosyncratic personal constructs.” Cannadine rarely puts his emotions on display, but on this question he does: “Future world leaders who invoke ‘civilization,’ ” he writes, “ought to be more circumspect about doing so than many who have recently and irresponsibly been bandying it around to such baleful effect.”

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I can only hope that “The Undivided Past” will have all the impact of Huntington’s work, serving as an important reminder that human beings around the world not only have much in common but also have improved the conditions of their lives over time. Here, though, is where I worry that Cannadine’s scheme is just a bit too neat. Each of his six identities is treated in the same way: never were they unified and none have managed to trump the others. At times Cannadine, much like a Spengler, seems to be writing theory rather than history. He has an uplifting story to tell, but one suspects that he is telling it too schematically.

The uplift, in addition, may prove temporary. It is true that some predictions of identity conflict now seem obsolete; feminist theories stressing how women reason differently from men, for example, have by and large given way to liberal ideas about gender equality. Yet who is to say that other forms of conflict may not make a comeback? Should present trends toward income inequality persist in the West, for example, class struggle may re-­emerge in our future. Religious hostility is still with us, and the potential for wars between nations is ever-present.

Cannadine is clearly correct that Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain . . . where ignorant armies clash by night,” is receding, and his optimism is both refreshing and necessary. Alas, the past was always divided and the future is very likely to be so as well.

THE UNDIVIDED PAST

Humanity Beyond Our Differences

By David Cannadine

340 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

Alan Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College, is the author of “Political Evil” and “The Future of Liberalism.”

A version of this review appears in print on April 21, 2013, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A Common Struggle. Today's Paper|Subscribe